Heroku now lets you play with your data without making a mess

Heroku, the platform as a service owned by Salesforce.com has introduced a nifty new feature for people who want to play around with their data. The service, called Fork, let’s companies make a copy of their data that they can messwith and change without it affecting their production database.

In the same way you can fork your code you can now fork your data. Fork changes the way you can work with your data, making it a snap to provision a clone of your production database. The technology is simple, safe, and robust, and thanks to Heroku Postgres’ cloud architecture, places no load on your primary database. Today, we’re announcing the release of this functionality into General Availability.

Fork works as part of the Heroku Postgres service and via a command using the Heroku command line interface. It’s easy and it means that you can test your application against a version of your database without mucking up your actual production environment. It looks like the database version of the developer sandbox, which is pretty cool.